The Los Angeles Times reports that Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detectives believe that Stephanie Lazarus, the LAPD detective just arrested and charged with the 1986 murder of Sherri Rae Rasmussen, the wife of her former lover, ditched the gun she used in the killing and reported the weapon stolen shortly thereafter.
Rasmussen was found dead in her Van Nuys town house with three .38 calibur bullets in her chest. A few weeks after the murder, Lazarus, who was a young police officer with the LAPD, called the Santa Monica Police Department to report that someone broke into car while it was parked on 2nd street near the pier and stole her gym bag. Lazarus further reported that the gym bag had her clothes, some cassettes, a few dollars and her personal .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver in it at the time it was stolen. A Santa Monica police official acknowledged the existence of the report and confirmed its contents.
Now detectives believe Lazarus actually tossed the gun in the Pacific Ocean and made a false theft report in an effort to cover up her involvement in the murder.
If, in fact, detectives are correct, the gun would be another missed opportunity for the original detectives on the case who seemed to have just refused to investigate Lazarus as a real suspect in the murder despite a number of factors that pointed to her as a distinct possibility.
Lazarus was the ex=girlfriend of Rassmussen’s husband, John Ruetten, who found his wife’s body after the murder. Shortly after the killing, Rassmussen’s father repeatedly told police that his daughter had been threatened several times in the months leading up to the killing by “an ex-girlfriend of [Ruetten's] who is an LAPD officer.” In one of those confrontations, according to the father, Lazarus allegedly showed up in uniform at the hospital where Rasmussen worked and told her, “If I can’t have John, nobody can.”
Despite this information, the original detectives appeared to have just disregarded it and, instead, pursued a theory that Rassmussen was killed by two burglars who had committed some recent robberies in the area.
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